Attitude-Independent Route Tracking for Subsea Power Cables Using a Scalar Magnetometer under High Sea Conditions

Abstract

To overcome the shortcoming wherein the accuracy of subsea cable detection can be affected by the determination of the bias vector, scale factors, and non-orthogonality corrections of the vector magnetometer, a real-time attitude-independent route tracking method for subsea power cables is investigated theoretically and experimentally by means of scalar magnetic field checking. The measurement of the magnetic field Bc produced by the current in a cable is made immune to the influence of the platform attitude by extracting the component of Bc along the geomagnetic field using a high-bandwidth self-oscillating optically pumped magnetometer. The self-oscillating frequency is proved to be independent of the attitude of the magnetometer with the theoretical model. Experiments are carried out to test the attitude-independent performance, and the effectiveness of route tracking is verified by the results of the sea experiment. The proposed method will effectively improve the ability to locate subsea cables under high sea conditions.